Hey Goats,

We've already seen 100 posts filled with our shock and general frustrating about the shutdown of Voat, so I'll spare you paragraphs of that now, I just wanted to follow up and say I've finally got rolling on what I said I was going to do. A spiritual successor for voat.

https://zygoat.co

My administration style is pretty much what we've expected out of the wild west here; I don't care what you say and who you say it about, I only have to draw the line at things that can lead to legal trouble, which pretty much boils down to no child exploitation or revenge porn posted and we'll be just fine.

I'll be working on a proper warrant canary shortly.

So why did I deploy with something like Lemmy?

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

One of the key things about Lemmy is that it's build to take advantage of Federation. This definitely doesn't excite the Commies behind the software itself and their flagship instances, but the point is that much like the GNU Social / Mastodon / Pleroma situation for microblogging, some fediverses split off, others became larger hubs and those that wished to associate with each other did and do to this day.

So that's my objective, not for zygoat.co to be the one, sole solitary replacement for voat.co, but for it to be one of a dozen that those of you out there with the ability to maintain your own instance will put up, and we will federate and the content will flow inbetween the different sites without any concern for who is where. If one of the dozen sites goes down, we can jump on any of the others and the content will still be there from the former servers because it passed through and on to the other servers through federation. This is the difference versus another site like poal which, as soon as they pull the plug, the content is gone again, and at least with our proposed solution the content will be passed along to be findable on other federated instances.

I liked zygoat as a homage so I registered a bunch of different domains with it. I plan on using them to assign to other projects that will be distributed under this umbrella in order to best serve the community:

• I plan on making a temp image file host like catbox so that we're not so dependent on that. I'd like to find a way to decentralize that storage.
• Tomorrow I will have a matrix/element/riot.im whatever you want to call it chat server up so that we can talk meta about the to-do list for the site proper, and so that you can fuck around with that, too. Element is effectively a federated Slack/Discord that gives us the same benefits.
• Pleroma - I plan on building a microblogging site into this umbrella as well, so that if people want to Twitter their shitposts they can take it there instead whatever our /whatever equivalent will be on the main site. Pleroma is also federated.
• I know there was talk of a decentralized chan imageboard implementation, nntpchan? I will research further and deploy that as well after I do everything else above.

Here's to hoping this is a kick off for us to have servers and services in little nooks and crannies across the planet so that one large takedown never affects us ever again.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Please also don't poo poo it right out the gate in its vanilla install state. Of course I know there's tons we have to do in order to make it look good, feel good and fit our preferences.